Argentina LTE Smartphones Grew More Than 1600% Annually

According to the latest Market Monitor Report from Counterpoint Research, Argentina’s mobile device market had more than 214% YoY and 27% sequential growth in Q4 2015.

Commenting the findings Peter Richardson, Director at Counterpoint Research said, “Argentina was late launching LTE networks as the spectrum was only allocated during 3Q2014, and first network became available in December 2014. This meant the handset OEMs have been playing catch up with LTE enabled devices.”

Tina Lu, Senior Analyst at Counterpoint Research added, “The mobile device market growth was catalyzed by the national elections as the incoming government completely relaxed restrictions on the importation of components for local assembly of mobile devices. This allowed natural demand to be better fulfilled leading to strong year on year growth – especially of LTE capable devices which grew by a factor of 16 over the previous year. The top five manufacturers all increased market share with Samsung and LG leading the market in terms of both share and growth in share.”

Market Summary:

98% of total mobile devices shipped in Argentina were smartphones. Argentina is the top market in Latin America in terms of smartphone shipment penetration.

Smartphone grew 232 % YoY, and 26% sequentially. This growth was pushed by the government to help Argentines feel that the new government is making a positive difference.

ASP increased by 23% mainly driven by the massive growth of LTE devices.

Feature phone demand is still there, but OEMs has been producing only smartphones.

Almost 70% of the smartphones shipped in Argentina during Q4 2015 were LTE capable. With more than 1600% annual growth.

Exhibit 1: Argentina Smartphone Shipment

Samsung, LG and Motorola are the top 3 smartphone vendors in Argentina.

Samsung and LG have the highest YoY increase. None of the top five brands have lost share YoY.

Samsung continues to be the biggest smartphone supplier in Argentina, leading the category for 13 consecutive quarters.

Samsung gained 340 basis points of share YoY, up to 38.3%. It was possible as the OEM was extremely aggressive, offering price rebates of up to $1000 pesos (about U$D 75) and many promotional activities during the Christmas holidays.

Motorola reached the 3rd place, but had a 450 basis point QoQ decrease in volume market share.

Huawei was in the 5th place, having almost doubled its share on a YoY basis.

Local brands such as BGH and Noblex are getting some traction in the market. These brands combined represented almost 10% of the whole market, more than double the previous quarter’s 4%.

The comprehensive and in-depth Q4 2015 and CY 2015 Market Monitor is available for subscribing clients. Please feel free to contact us at [email protected] for further enquiries regarding our latest research, insights or press enquiries.

Methodology

The Market Monitor research is based on sell-in (shipments) estimates based on vendor’s IR results, vendor polling, triangulated with sell-through (sales), supply chain checks and secondary research.

Senior Analyst
Tina has extensive consulting and analysis experience across a number of industry sectors including more than 14 years in the technology industry. Before Counterpoint, Tina spent more than 9 years in Nokia working in multiple roles and geographic regions. Tina also worked in brand and product marketing for Bestfoods-Unilever and BGH. Tina holds an MBA degree from the Thunderbird School of Global Management.